"In Hollywood, everyone has a script. But Arthur Vance's final draft wasn't written for the box office-it was written in blood."
Rory Callahan is the film industry's most elite script doctor-the behind-the-scenes "cinematic coroner" called in by studio heads to fix broken third acts and salvage multi-million-dollar disasters. But when the reclusive widow of legendary director Arthur Vance offers her a quarter-million dollars to finish his final, unproduced thriller, The Obsidian Mirror, Rory steps into a production where the bullets are terrifyingly real.
Deep within the encrypted margins of Vance's 35mm shooting script, Rory uncovers a horrifying mathematical cipher. The scenes do not depict Hollywood fiction. They map out fifty years of staged celebrity homicides, fraudulent multi-million-dollar insurance payouts, and the unsolved murder of Rory's own father, a studio prop artisan killed in a mysterious 1986 backlot fire.
Partnered with former federal forensic investigator Nathan Cross, Rory finds herself hunted across Los Angeles by a ruthless private military syndicate determined to protect a $4.2 billion studio acquisition at all costs. With the studio's centenary gala counting down to a live global broadcast of forty million viewers, Rory must use her father's antique tools and her own lethal eye for story structure to execute the ultimate counter-script... before the cameras roll on her final scene.